Office Hours, a webinar series presented by the Caltech 2024 Election Integrity Project

Please join us on Thursday, October 3, 2024 at 11:00 am Pacific for the fifth installment of Office Hours, a webinar series presented by the Caltech 2024 Election Integrity Project and moderated by R. Michael Alvarez, PhD, Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science at Caltech and Co-Director, Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy (LCSSP).

During this episode of Office Hours, we'll talk with three election technology provider representatives - Ben Adida, Executive Director of VotingWorks, Sara Cutter, Executive Director of the American Council for Election Technology (ACET), and Ed Smith, Vice President, Election Solutions of the MTX Group - about their unique challenges in supporting U.S. elections and their state and local government election official customers across the country and around the world in today's political climate.

Ben Adida is the Founder and Executive Director of VotingWorks, the only non-profit maker of voting equipment in the United States. Ben has worked on voting technology since 1998 and is a world-renowned election security expert who regularly speaks about election security at leading conferences. He also has extensive experience in online identity, payments, health IT, security & privacy, and Web architecture. Ben has been a free software developer for more than 25 years, and has been building Web software for almost 30 years. Previously, Ben was Vice President of Engineering at Clever, Director of Engineering at Square, Director of Engineering at Mozilla, Research Faculty at Harvard Medical School / Children's Hospital Boston, and a research fellow with the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard. Ben received his PhD from MIT's Cryptography and Information Security group where he focused on election security.

Sara Cutter is the Executive Director of the American Council for Election Technology (ACET), a national, nonpartisan trade association of election system provider members that serves as the unified voice of election technology, promoting policies that support secure, accurate, transparent, and accessible elections. In addition to her role at ACET, Sara is a political law attorney with Vantage Legal in Washington, DC, where she specializes in political law, overseeing compliance and strategic initiatives that shape election operations nationwide. Prior to her legal practice, Sara was instrumental in operational and financial oversight as the Executive Director of Colorado BUILDS, where she spearheaded organizational growth and strategic planning. Sara holds a JD from George Mason University, Antonin Scalia Law School, a BBA from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and brings over 10 years of experience in legal and policy advisory roles.

Ed Smith is the Vice President of Election Solutions for the MTX Group, a company that enables digital transformation for its public and private sector clients. Ed possesses over two decades of executive leadership experience in the election technology industry having served in senior leadership positions for election technology providers that include Hart InterCivic, Sequoia Voting Systems, Dominion Voting Systems, Clear Ballot Group, and Smartmatic. Ed and teams reporting directly to him have supported election solution deployments in over 30 States, four Provinces in Canada, and nations in Europe and Asia. Ed is a founding member of the Elections Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council (EI-SCC), responsible for building resilience in protecting and defending our nation's critical voting infrastructure, and has previously served on its executive committee and as its Chair in 2022. Ed also served as the first representative from the voting technology industry appointed to serve as a Scientific Expert Member for the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), a group chartered by the US Election Assistance Commission. Ed earned his MBA with a focus on Finance/Statistics from the University of Phoenix and his Bachelor of Science in Engineering Technology from Texas A&M University.

Register in advance for this meeting: https://caltech.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_eS4GHf85SbWuWr3O0Y0bnQ

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

For more information on the Caltech 2024 Election Integrity Project, please visit our website at. https://www.protectingtheelection.us, or email us at [email protected].